bugs in pam_env

Antonio Capanna piribillo at yahoo.it
Sat Feb 25 09:54:44 UTC 2017


Hi,
I found some errors and unexpected/confusing behaviour in pam_env.

1)
The user environment file is not parsed with the correct function, but it is parsed as a configuration file. This means that DEFAULT and OVERRIDE are recognized as special words and that parameter expansion is done.
Please see pam_env.c at line 826.
The parsing seems to work just because of unexpected behaviour #4 below (that is, also in config file the syntax "variable=value" is honored, even if because of an error.)

2)
>From what I understand, setting DEFAULT= deletes a variable if OVERRIDE is empty or non-existing. But with some configuration combinations you get inconsistent behaviour:
this_variable_is_removedthis_one_is_removed_too DEFAULT=this_one_is_removed_as_well OVERRIDE="" DEFAULT=also_this_one_is_removed DEFAULT= OVERRIDE=but_this_one_is_added_as_empty_var OVERRIDE= DEFAULT=
This happens because in pam_env.c, in function _parse_line, variable quoteflg is not properly handled (more specifically, it is decremented even when it shouldn't).

3)

I don't know if it is a bug or not, but it's most definitely unexpected.If in the env file I write:
export a=1
it works. But:
export  b=2   # note that there are two spacesexport    c=3 # note that there is a TAB character
do not work. The parser in _parse_env_file (pam_env.c:220) does not handle anything different from a single space.

4)
If in conf file I write:
variable# or
variable DEFAULT=

the expected behaviour is to remove that variable from the environment. But the parser does not check for '=' signs, so if have this in the conf file (NOT in the env file):
this_does_not_do_what_expected=yeah# or even this:
neither_does_this=ohyeah!     DEFAULT=

the module tries to remove the variable "this_does_not_do_what_expected=yeah" from the environment (as per debug log: remove variable "this_does_not_do_what_expected=yeah"), but it results in adding the variable "this_does_not_do_what_expected" instead, with value = "yeah".
Note that this is the reason why the parsing of the user environment file seems to work.

5)
The '#' char is recognized as comment even if it's not the first non-blank character in the line (differently from what written in the man page).Especially, a conf line like this one:
variable DEFAULT="a#b"
does not work, it results in an error (Unterminated quoted string: "a). If not supported, this should be at least mentioned in the manual.Note that the same problem is in the env file, because the line parsing function is the same (_assemble_line).

6)
pam_env.c:74:/* This is a flag used to designate an empty string */static char quote='Z';
but in function check_var (row 511):    if (&quote == var->defval) {      /*       * This means that the empty string was given for defval value       * which indicates that a variable should be defined with no value       */      *var->defval = '\0';
as it can be seen, the last line changes the value of quote. This does not seem to have ill effects, but it is not nice because quote becomes = '\0', which has also a special meaning different from quote itself (quote means the empty quoted string, '\0' means the empty unquoted string).

7)
the "_parse_env_file" function in pam_env.c gets lines using function "_assemble_line", but then repeats a lot of the checks that have already been done (comments, empty lines, whitespaces at the beginning, ...)

Regards
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